CPA and the North Carolina Legislature;

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The CPA and the North Carolina Legislature
by J. WILLIAM STEWART, JR. Partner, Charlotte Office
* Presented before the Charlotte Area Chapter of the North Carolina Association of Certified Public Accountants, with State Legislators from Mecklenburg County as guests, Charlotte — January 1963
As YOU CAN SURMISE from the preceding talk, the CPAs have been
busy meeting the challenges that changes in the business life of our country have created. There seems to be no end to the demand for our services, which become more complex each year. Despite all the emphasis, particularly during the past few years since "Sputnik," on the need for and great future awaiting engineers, physicists, chem­ists,
and all the scientific fields affected by the space age, I still think that the youth of today would have no brighter future in any field of endeavor than in the profession of accounting, because of the ex­panded
needs resulting from the ever increasing demands.
The constantly increasing challenges outlined by the previous speaker have required CPAs to spend time that perhaps should have been devoted to public relations, in preparing for and meeting these challenges. Although our clients are well aware of who we are, what we stand for, and what service we can perform, they constitute a very small part of the general public. No doubt all segments of business and industry, and particularly our sister professions, feel that their public relations could be improved, but it appears to me that some have done a better job than the CPAs.
The elements of our profession that are inseparable from it—the confidential nature of our work and our comparative insulation from the man-in-the-street—will never permit us to be as well known to the general public as the medical, teaching, and some other professions. The general public knows what an M.D. is because at one time or another, beginning at birth, all of us need the services of a doctor. A wide segment is also familiar with the letters Ph.D. since many are privileged to spend the major portion of their younger years in schools and colleges. Moreover, the activities of the CPA are not usually quite so dramatic as those of the doctor or lawyer, so we cannot even rely on television to put us in the public eye in the way Ben Casey, Perry Mason, and others do for the medical and legal professions.
Perhaps we can say, however, that the CPAs are on the right * Mr. Stewart was President of the Association when he gave this address.
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